Resettling Refugee History

Abstract

Abstract This article pursues a longue durée study of the US refugee to resettle, in necessary and generative ways, contemporary interest in the refugee as representative of a current “global crisis” and as inherently tied to the unique violence of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It argues that the twentieth century is not the only thinkable or relevant period for a refugee literary history. The colonial construction of “asylum,” the word we refer today as a legal source of political protection for refugees, was in earlier times intertwined with the development of an exclusionary migration regime, vestiges of which continue to govern the reception of migrants today. The very idea of asylum, despite becoming a legal fixture of human rights law in the twentieth century, was never meant to be expansive in the US. How we make sense of this disjuncture is a serious project for literary scholarship invested in refugees and migration. The limbo that many contemporary refugees find themselves in today, in detention camps and other make-shift shelters, is tied to the US’s early fictional conception of itself as a refuge for white European foreigners.